Coastal Cowboy
This aggression will not stand, man!Verified MemberECF Veteran

I think blaming Smok products for this is not the right thing to do. I'm not saying it was not a problem with the mod but don't know. Without knowing what happened before it vented is a problem was it dropped or have juice leaked into it don't know. Implying it was a defective product based on unknown facts is just what anti-vapers do
. I am not trying to be disrespectful to anyone I have much respect for everyone on here and I agree that something should be done to safeguard people but that goes for all vape companies.

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I agree that it is difficult to determine what made the charger's safety feature fail. That failure made the battery get excessive current, which made it unstable and made it go boom. It's the only way that happens.

I agree that it is difficult to determine what made the charger's safety feature fail. That failure made the battery get excessive current, which made it unstable and made it go boom. It's the only way that happens.

From what I understand, tube shaped internal li-po mods are inherently more dangerous than any other. The volatile chemistry with the fact that they run hot due to the shape makes it more likely to fail. The shape with the tube being incredibly strong puts the weak points at the ends of the tube when it does. One of those is pointed at the users face. I am not sure if this is a passthrough device but if so, it is fortunate he was not using it at the time. I would suggest a fireproof charging bag like the ones they have for rc batteries for anybody who purchases one of these. I would also suggest to never use it while plugged in.

Don’t put the charger or device in that bag though! It can cause overheating, leading to the very thing you’re trying to protect against.

CHARGING BAGS. YAH OR NAY?

This is a controversial subject. Those who use them say that the flame retardant bag will contain a fire caused by either the battery or charger. Those who don't use them say they may actually create a problem where none existed. Charging bags were designed to be used with Li-Po batteries and chargers. Li-Po batteries are used in the remote control car and plane hobby. These batteries are not a safer-chemistry battery, and a "battery incident" with one can be quite spectacular if you are into fireworks and flames.

Li-Po batteries are typically not charged in the chargers. The charger and batteries are kept separate by a reasonable distance, connected by long cables. The batteries are placed into the bag, and the charger remains outside of the bag. This is because chargers produce some heat while they charge batteries, and leaving the charger outside of the bag allows the charger to be cooled by natural air circulation.

Li-ion batteries are charged while in the charger box, so if using a charging bag both the batteries and charger will be contained inside of the bag. The theory against using a charging bag is that the charger may generate enough heat in the bag to cause a problem of heating up the battery, and the heat generated will not be allowed to ventilate inside the bag. I'll leave the decision up to the reader whether to use a charging bag or not, but it doesn't seem like a good idea to me.

The wall "charger" isn't a charger at all, it's usually just a power supply, sometimes with minor security features like cheap current limiting built in. It puts out the 5V and XAmps you need, usually there's no charging logic in it.

The logic is built into the device, that's where the real voltage+current regulation takes place (essential for loading lion and lipo) and that's where I expect the security to be. If the wall charger is faulty a good device doesn't really suffer from that (well... as long as its not hoopajooped beyond recognition and supplies a remotely correct constant voltage). Even if the wall plug thingy doesn't have any means to limit current the device shouldn't care because it doesn't need to draw a big amount of current, the wall plug doesn't "push" current.

So either the device is faulty, by design or by error, or the battery itself is faulty (like skunk suspects) and the device doesn't detect there's a problem. Either way the manufacturer of the device could do better.

This would be my general assessment of the situation, there may be other things involved that were already stated above drop/moisture/fakery/younameit.

I'd not advise those bags though, you can't warn of thermal problems and in the next sentence suggest loading the device in a nice and cozy warm bag with no ventilation. That just sounds a bit too much like asking for it for my taste

I don't know why that mod turned into fireworks, but the reality is anything containing a Li ion battery can fall spectacularly. That's from a mod to a phone to a laptop to a freaking airplane (for those who remember Boeing having to ground their brand new 787s when they first entered service due to Li battery fires).

If you want to reduce the chance of failure use a decent charger with your name brand replaceable batteries, keep stuff on a nonflammable surface, and don't charge unattended or overnight, as getting woken up by your home smoke detector is never pleasant. But never expect anything with a Li ion battery, no matter how rare it might occur, to be incapable of an impressive failure.

Just wondering if the wall wart could have been faulty?
I've seen them being sold in the local Dollar store.
Maybe Smok and other companies should include the appropriate wall wart.

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The wall wart shouldn't be able to cause that. The charger is inside the mod and the wall wart will only provide the power that the mod draws. If the wall wart was faulty it would've failed, not the mod.

I don't bash them, but I don't buy them either. Not because of any stories of failure, but b/c I watch a couple of reviewers that test them with oscilloscopes. When you see a "TC" mod set to 450F actually get to 500F instead, that is just bad design and I am not going to risk overheating my juice like that. You wouldn't bake in an oven that far off. Nearly every single SMOK device I have seen tested had at least moderate inaccuracies. There have been a few that were reasonably close, but with all of the other inaccuracies, I have to ask if the accurate one is representative of that entire model series or just a lucky fluke. So I am sorry, you may have a SMOK device that may seem to great, but is it really? Have you tested it for accuracy? I would rather buy devices from manufacturers that are more consistently accurate. Granted there is nothing that is 100% accurate, but there is a huge difference between being off 2F to 5F and being off by as much as 20F to 50F. Wattages with SMOK can be a bit better than their TC, but they are still sometimes wildly inaccurate here as well. When you take these inaccuracies and then see all the stories of premature failure, you have to ask is it really worth it? My personal opinion is, that it isn't.

Bottom line I have never told anyone to not buy a SMOK mod but I will never recommend one either. I have used a couple of their tanks though and liked them just fine.

The wall wart shouldn't be able to cause that. The charger is inside the mod and the wall wart will only provide the power that the mod draws. If the wall wart was faulty it would've failed, not the mod.

Sent from my Thor E using Tapatalk

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I agree. The device being charged should have a current limiting resistor that governs the current level the device draws. In the video we saw in the OP something in the device being charged failed and presented a short/low resistance to the charger and began to create heat rapidly to the point of self destruct within the mod.

There is a huge variance, then, between normal USB ports rated at 500mA, and dedicated charging ports, which range all the way up to 3,000mA. This leads to an important question: If you take a phone which came with a 900mA wall charger, and plug it into a 2,100mA iPad charger, as an example, will it blow up?

In short, no: You can plug any USB device into any USB cable and into any USB port, and nothing will explode — and in fact, using a more powerful charger should speed up battery charging. We now do this all the time with our mobile devices here at ExtremeTech, and we’ve never had a problem.

Has anyone converted the SMOK V8 Stick to a replaceable battery? I like my V8 mod but never liked that it was a closed system. I have looked it over looks like the top and bottom are glued to the hull, no screws. Seems like you pry it open and thread the bottom and add some slot to the bottom and have a way to remove and replace the battery, which would be a safer way to charge it.

Another question for the video creator: Were you using the standard SMOK cable to recharge it? Were any other items plugged into the place where the charging was taking place? Was the tank on the device? I have been charging the device right next to me and want to avoid getting blown up.

Another question for the video creator: Were you using the standard SMOK cable to recharge it? Were any other items plugged into the place where the charging was taking place? Was the tank on the device? I have been charging the device right next to me and want to avoid getting blown up.

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The video creator is not on this forum as far as I know. I posted the video on ECF. I was notified of the video from Mooch's Facebook page, which had a link to the Reddit thread. The link to that thread is in my original post of this thread should you wish to read it.

The "victim" was using a standard 1 amp cord. He didn't say if it was the one supplied by SMOK, but that really shouldn't matter if you know the amp rating of the cord. The tank was on the mod while charging; that shouldn't matter either.

We will probably never learn the technical reason why that battery exploded, but it can be reasonably concluded that there was an electronic failure of the onboard (internal) charger inside the mod.

Very unlikely. It takes a lot of work and some special tools to even design and build a system to enable it to be opened and closed. If you want a tube mod with exchangeable battery and don't need more than 50W (which I wouldn't advise to go over with a single battery anyways) then just get an ehpro 101 for about 30 doll hairs.
Converting the smok wouldn't be worth the time and material you're spending by a long shot.

The battery itself, which SMOK buys from who-knows-where, could easily have been the culprit.

Here's a really good report on Li-Ion battery failures. It's clear that these batteries can be damaged &/or defective in such a way that can eventually lead to catastrophic failure long before they are ever placed in devices for use.